"What if everything is always unruly complexity?

From mathematical ecology
to Raymond Williams and
into open spaces beyond"


Peter Taylor
U Mass Boston
peter.taylor@umb.edu http://bit.ly/pjtaylor
BABEL12.pdf

Gathered and shared thoughts from the lab

• A humanities "lab" using this format would help scientists think more about what they are doing in relation to unruly complexity.
• How can we create a narrative of unruly complexity?
• Graph as representation -- division not only of steps but of ways to divide thinking in disciplines -- is it productive to dwell on these divisions? -- to retain ghost of disciplinary divisions?
• The ways in which a singular event can be seen as multivalent and represented as such through a complex dialogue of space, place, and causality.
• Disciplining, representing unruly complexity (in graph, language, etc.) is a form of unruly complexity.
• The process itself of building understanding together seemed to suggest that such disciplining could be generative rather than suppressive.
• I'm interested to think more about Julie's question to do with causality and explanation -> for what purpose are we describing/disciplining (etc.) unruly complexity, and how do different disciplines lose different elements of complexity?
• By allowing for an unruly complexity are we aiming to gain a larger perspective on a given question? What does disciplining do to limit or enhance that notion?
• What is lost by the necessary simplification that occurs when we marry the sciences and humanities? What is gained? Is the gain worth the loss?
• Using "unruly complexity" as a mode of teaching complex historical situations, how they developed (& how far they reach).
• Everyone's comments made me reflect on how the results of studying unruly complexity might be represented -- how new aesthetic & rhetorical solutions may be necessary to convey knowledge.
• Questions about causality lead to broader ways in which we imagine interrelated parts of time, space and change.
• Unruly complexity is a framework for understanding change as experienced both in micro and macro ways.
• The challenge of representing (let alone analyzing or accounting for) multicausal, non-linear complexity using narrative or descriptive tools that tend to be linear and reductive.
• How much of discourse is a gesture towards boundaries on a chaotic meaning-making process rather than a statement of coded meaning?
• The complexity is always far more complex than even the furthest imaginings of even a group of people could imagine, so the conversation must be ongoing, open-ended & work towards becoming universal. Everyone & everything must be heard (eventually).
• What are the distinctions between 'disciplining complexity' and 'articulating complexity' -- and does one involve the self/the public more than the other? (or in different ways?)
• To identify or propose a cause is to discipline unruly complexity.
• How do we translate disparate languages of the disciplines?
• Can cross-disciplinary work operate across more than one language (mode of communication) at the same time?
• Excavating "unruly complexity" in terms of building upon of ideas; a conversation that grows indefinitely.